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trade policy

After a long battle with cancer, Ambassador Clayton Yeutter passed away on Saturday at the age of 86 at his home in Potomac, Maryland. With his passing, the world parts not only with a brilliant, effective, accomplished leader, but an extraordinarily generous, decent man whose enduring kindness and humble demeanor made politics and policymaking in Washington more tolerable for all involved.

Clayton Yeutter had a long an illustrious career spent in both the private and public sectors, as well as in academia, but he is probably best known for his service during the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.

As Reagan’s U.S. Trade Representative from 1985 to 1989, Ambassador Yeutter presided over implementation of the very first U.S. bilateral free trade agreement (with Israel) and he launched and oversaw negotiation of the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement, which evolved into the North American Free Trade Agreement, to include Mexico, in 1994.

As USTR, Ambassador Yeutter also launched and advanced the “Uruguay Round” of multilateral trade negotiations in 1986, under the auspices of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which resulted in broader and deeper reductions in global barriers to trade than had previously been achieved, and it established the World Trade Organization in 1995.

During the first two years of the George H.W. Bush administration (1989-91), Yeutter served as Secretary of Agriculture, where he was instrumental in steering U.S. agricultural policy back to a more market orientation, from which it had deviated in the mid-1980s. The 1990 farm bill (The Food, Agriculture, Conservation, and Trade Act of 1990) included reductions in agricultural subsidies that were negotiated during the Uruguay Round.

Yeutter held other high-profile positions, including an eight-year stint as President and CEO of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange—a period during which the volume of trade in agricultural, currency, and interest rate futures more than tripled. He served as Republican National Committee Chairman for two years, following the death of Lee Atwater.

Donald Trump’s upset victory over Hillary Clinton last night is bound to stir up fears of instability and uncertainty in East Asia, a region that was almost entirely ignored during the campaign. Commentators have rushed to predict that Trump’s campaign rhetoric will turn into reality: the United States will pull back from East Asia, and China will take advantage of the ensuing chaos to seize geopolitical dominance of the region. This morning James Palmer at Foreign Policy writes, “Chinese leaders near me in the palatial complex of Zhongnanhai are surely cracking open the drinks.” This is a pretty scary vision of the future. However, such assessments, which focus solely on Chinese benefits, don’t take into account the complex nature of U.S.-China relations.

President Trump is by no means a clear victory for China. The uncertainty created by his victory could easily produce an economic and geopolitical climate that damages Chinese interests. For example, three of the seven points in Trump’s Plan to Rebuild the American Economy mention policies that would hurt the U.S.-China economic relationship: labeling China a currency manipulator; bringing trade cases against China in the World Trade Organization; and imposing tariffs in response to “illegal activities.” Igniting a trade war with China would pose a severe risk to China’s economy, which is already slowing down. Trump’s stated policies would likely deepen China’s economic woes, thereby increasing the domestic instability that Beijing is obsessed with avoiding, especially in the lead-up to the 19th Party Congress in late 2017.

Americans have lately been debating the tradeoffs we face as the global poor rise. Their gains have been enormous and unprecedented. And yet the American working class has struggled to better itself even as conditions have improved for most others:

Percentiles 80-95 contain many from the relatively rich countries’ lower-income classes; there are a lot of Americans in there. Other factors may be at work, but let’s say for the sake of argument that the gains by the global poor have on balance harmed at least some of them.

So why is this happening? Is it part of some other nation’s malicious plan? Is it China, perhaps? Or India? Or did we inadvertently do it to ourselves, through bad trade agreements or “soft” foreign policy?

It’s natural to want to make the story about us, or our actions, or a villain who threatens us. Those sorts of explanations are politically useful; they suggest that the right leader can get us out of the mess we’re in.

But maybe the correct explanation isn’t about us at all. One way to see this is to ask a slightly different question: Why is the Great Global Enrichment happening right now? Why didn’t it happen in the 1960s? It happened in the 1960s in Japan, after all. It presumably could have happened elsewhere too. So why not?

Many scholars have long agreed that the Smoot-Hawley tariff had disastrous economic effects, but most of them have felt that it could not have caused the stock market collapse of October 1929, since the tariff was not signed into law until the following June. Today we know that market participants do not wait for a major law to pass, but instead try to anticipate whether or not it will pass and what its effects will be.

Consider the following sequence of events:

The Smoot-Hawley tariff passes the House on May 28, 1929. Stock prices in New York (1926=100) drop from 196 in March to 191 in June. On June 19, Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee meet to rewrite the bill. Hoping for improvement, the market rallies, but industrial production ( 1967 = 100) peaks in July, and dips very slightly through September. Stocks rise to 216 by September, hit­ting their peak on the third of the month. The full Senate Finance Committee goes to work on the tariff the following day, moving it to the Senate floor later in the month.

On October 21, the Senate rejects, 64 to 10, a move to limit tariff increases to agriculture. “A weakening of the Democratic-Progressive Coalition was evidenced on October 23,” notes the Commercial and Financial Chronicle. In this first test vote, 16 members of the anti-tariff coalition switch sides and vote to double the tariff on calcium carbide from Canada. Stocks collapse in the last hour of trading; the following morning is christened Black Thursday. On October 28, a delegation of senators appeals to President Hoover to help push a tariff bill through quickly (which he does on the 31st). The Chronicle headlines news about broker loans on the same day: “Recall of Foreign Money Grows Heavier-All Europe Withdrawing Capital.” The following day is stalemate. Stocks begin to rally after November 14, rising steadily from 145 in November to 171 in April. Industrial production stops falling and hovers around the December level through March.

Two recent economic studies purporting to estimate the impact of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement on the U.S. economy have sparked a kerfuffle between the deal’s advocates and detractors. One study, published by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, estimates increases to U.S. income of 0.5 percent by 2030 with gains to labor accruing slightly more than gains to capital. The other, published by Tufts University’s Global Development and Environment Institute, estimates that the TPP would reduce U.S. income by 0.5 percent, reduce employment by almost half a million jobs, and increase income inequality. The findings of each study are being trumpeted as dispositive by their respective constituencies. Who’s right?

In a recent blog post, PIIE-affiliated economist Robert Lawrence wrote that to judge the credibility of these models, three questions should be asked: Is the model used appropriate for exploring trade policy? Does the model depict TPP sensibly? Are the results credible? Lawrence then goes on to explain why he answers “yes” to each question regarding the PIIE study and “no” to each regarding the Tufts study. Well sure, Bob, at a minimum, those criteria are important. And they help distinguish the PIIE model as relatively credible – that is, relative to the Tufts model. But what about relative to reality?

A model might depict TPP sensibly, but incompletely and imprecisely. How can we be sure those imperfections don’t have a large impact on the results? And even if the results are credible, in that they don’t deviate dramatically from expectations, their purpose – or, at least, the weight assigned to these studies in the public’s mind – is to produce reasonable estimates, not to corroborate the model’s capacity to process reasonable expectations.

With apologies to my trade economist friends, anyone who treats the estimates produced by economic models as mathematical truths is, well, part of the problem. Lawrence doesn’t do that, but too many trade policy combatants do. Certainly, some models are more rigorous than others, but all rely on assumptions. The greater the number and complexity of exogenous policy changes being modeled, the greater the number of estimates and assumptions to incorporate, and the further removed from reality the results will be. Sometimes the estimates are merely best guesses and sometimes the assumptions have no better than a 50 percent probability of occurrence. For example, many of the economic benefits of TPP will derive from reductions in non-tariff barriers to trade, such as regulatory opaqueness. How does one model the increase in regulatory transparency? How does one account for stricter environmental or labor or intellectual property regulations? How does one assign numeric values to rules limiting restrictions on cross-border data flows?

Media have been reporting lately about the public’s burgeoning opposition to the Congress granting President Obama fast track trade negotiating authority. Among the evidence of this alleged opposition is a frequently cited survey, which finds that 62 percent of Americans oppose granting fast track to President Obama.

Considering that the survey producing that figure was commissioned by a triumvirate of anti-trade activist groups – the Communication Workers of America, the Sierra Club, and the U.S. Business and Industry Council – I had my doubts about the accuracy of that claim. After all, would lobbyists who devote so much of their efforts to derailing the trade agenda risk funding a survey that might produce results contrary to their objectives?

My skepticism – it turns out – was warranted. The 62 percent who allegedly “oppose giving the president fast-track authority for TPP [the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement]” actually oppose giving the president a definition of fast track that is woefully inaccurate. The graphic below shows the question and response tally, as presented in the report showing the survey’s results, which is here. Read the question that begins with “As you may know…”

The nominee for EU Trade Commissioner Karel de Gucht has taken the brave step of opposing carbon tariffs, called for by many European politicians (including, notably, French President Nicolas Sarkozy).

Not to get him in trouble with his boss, but U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk has been sounding like a free trader lately. I’m beginning to think Ambassador Kirk consumes the analyses we produce over here at the Cato Institute’s Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies. Well, let me rephrase: that he consumes the meat of our analyses, but still hides the vegetables under the picked-over potatoes.